Summary

From the publisher:

No matter what field you are working in or studying, Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering, and Management offers you a comprehensive understanding of systems ideas and methods to help you achieve unmatched success with your challenging projects. This unique resource helps you add a systems-scientific grounding to systems engineering enterprises, showing you how to solve intractable problems, design systems to accommodate complex environments, and manage both creative and operational systems. You learn how to conceive, design and manage a systems engineering process for optimal results.

The book is filled with examples and case studies from a wide range of areas, from integrated transport systems, security systems, and defense procurement, to missile defense architectures, famine relief, and managing markets. This innovative reference introduces a generic systems lifecycle theory that helps you understand how systems form, persist and decay, and presents a 5-layer classification for systems engineering. You discover how to use a generic reference model that allows systems of all types to be addressed within a common framework. Moreover, the book reveals how architecture is used to create system emergent properties, capabilities and behaviors.

Summary

From the Publisher

This book is about the mystery of why the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts.

Emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of relatively simple elements self-organizes to form more intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behavior. It’s a bottom-up model; rather than being engineered by a general or a master planner, emergence begins at the ground level. Systems that at first glance seem vastly different—ant colonies, human brains, cities, immune systems—all turn out to follow the rules of emergence. In each of these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies a scale above them: ants create colonies, urbanites create neighborhoods.

In the tradition of Being Digital and The Tipping Point, Steven Johnson, acclaimed as a “cultural critic with a poet’s heart” (The Village Voice), takes readers on an eye-opening intellectual journey from the discovery of emergence to its applications. He introduces us to our everyday surroundings, offering suprising examples of feedback, self-organization, and adaptive learning. How does a lively neighborhood evolve out of a disconnected association of shopkeepers, bartenders, and real estate developers? How does a media event take on a life of its own? How will new software programs create an intelligent World Wide Web?

Drawing upon evolutionary theory, urban studies, neuroscience, and computer games, Emergence is a guidebook to one of the key components of twenty-first-century culture. Until recently, Johnson explains, the disparate philosophers of emergence have worked to interpret the world. But today they are starting to change it. This book is the riveting story of that change and what it means for the future. If you’ve searched for information on the Web, played a recent video game, or accepted a collect call using voice recognition software, you’ve already encountered the new world of artificial emergence. Provocative, engaging, and sophisticated, Emergence puts you on the front lines of a sweeping revolution in science and thought.

Summary

This key text on system dynamics shows by example how structure determines behavior. This book is ideal not just for managers but for anyone interested in the dynamics of urban, ecological, and other systems. It covers feedback dynamics, models and simulation, equations and computation, flow diagrams, information links, integration, and more.

Summary

This volume combines the principles of systems engineering with those of architecting (the science and art of creating, designing, planning and certifying new structures) for a problem-solving approach to the design of large, complex projects.

It offers new conceptual models to engineers involved in the design of spacecraft, launch vehicles, aircraft and communication, computer or defence systems. With insights derived from real-world examples of major systems success and failures, this volume offers engineers the opportunity of saving time and money.

Highlights of the book include a detailed examination of the conceptual design phase, a heuristic approach to the teaching methods and a look at the various interrelated subjects of architecting.

Summary

From the Publisher:

The Art of Systems Architecting is for systems architects, for engineers and managers interested in extending their expertise, and for individuals concerned with creating, building, or using complex systems.

This innovative text addresses problems inherent in creating and building new and complex systems for electronics, computer, software, aerospace, and government purposes.